1. Workshop "Tools"

    Moderation: Petra Oberhuemer



      • The Aims are:

        • get teachers to use good software
        • show people mathematical software
        • show how to use software
        • evaluate software
        • check availability of open, free and demo-verisons for testing
        • put content together in a project
        • find "best ways" to present new kind of content
        • Re-usability,
        • possibility to unitize in a specific way, LOM
        • improve that we can work together



      Adrian Oldknow: "Engage teacher to produce web-content; Provide motivation for teacher."

      Mike Pearson: "Weblogs as tools for advertising, should be capable of displaying mathematical formulas."

      • We Wish:
        • Open source
        • Combination of Latex and MathML
      • Important features:
        • Accessibility
        • There is benefit in reusability
        • MathML
        • Multilinguality
        • SCORM: essential


      Mike Pearson: "The key point is a good authoring tool: usability criteria are of importance, for example: Reload tools (bad usability)"

      • Which tools might users need/want

      • Which tools are they used to? (MS-Word Formula-Editor, ...)

      • Which tools are available
        • OpenMath Editor http://www.w3.org/Math/implementations.html
        • Tool from Softscience: very good Generates (X)HTML+MathML+Unicode (Mike Pearson)
        • MathPlayer: there exists voice output (problem: needs to be downloaded and installed)
        • Camstudio: (tool to record desktop aktivity; as AVI)


      Ramon Eixarch: "OpenMath still needs several years to become sort of standard, MathML is already better developed"

      • Mike Pearson argues:
        • Teacher will mainly copy and paste
        • Latex2html / ttm
        • Open office does have a math editor
        • There is a XSLT Stylesheet (Russian development) brings MathML back to LaTex (and vice versa -? merry go round)


      Adrian Oldknow: "The main question is: How can we motivate math teachers to produce content? Teachers' motivation: might be a generation problem."

      • Reusability
        • Existing content: need to sequence and (re)structure it (e.g: mark a piece of text, put it in a shopping trolley, retrieve it later and paste it in other materials)
        • Weblogs: might be a means to classify old material (instead of Metadata), provides semantic information (Pearson)
        • Information, how people put items together should go back to the Database (digital repository)
        • Metadata, ...


      Ramon Eixarch presents: http://www.mathsformore.com/

      • Summary/general requirements:
        • developement of ease-of-use editor
        • Standards compliancy
        • Multilingualisme
        • Have a closer look at how we can get teachers use existing materials (re-use other materials)
        • Metadata: classifying older material using automatic tools
        • Possibility to add existing tools

      • Adrian: suggests a digital library also with audio-visual material
      • Decent open source software
      • Providing jpeg+video resource material (-? Dave Pratt)
      • Provide a pool of pictures+videos (free to use)


      Mike Pearson presents: Thesaurus.maths.org: database of mathematical concepts.